According to Scott, we can expect the first installation next
spring at a welcome center parking lot in Sandpoint, the town up
the road from SolarRoadway's HQ, also known as the Brusaw
residence.

"We've lined up a couple people to hire, we're looking at
some resumes, places in town, getting our ducks in a
row," the 56-year-old Brusaw told BI.

In the idealized case of
replacing all ~31,000 square miles of paved road- and walk-ways
in the lower 48 states with solar panels, Brusaw has calculated
that his panel designs could meet the ~3,800 billion kilowatt
hours of electricity consumed by the U.S. 3x over.

So it's easy to see why the
project has generated so much interest. Recently, though, there's
been a
spurt of
criticisms about the project, charging both unsustainaible
costs and untenable specs.

It's true that, in Brusaw already
anticipated some of the critiques in the
project's extensive
documentation. And The
Week's John Aziz (who first gave us
the head's upon this
story) also did a
great write-upof why it
seems unfair to second guess a project that's still in its
infancy.

Brusaw acknowledges that there is no guarantee of success
if one measures their potential solely on results in controlled
settings. Besides addressing anything unanticipated that comes up
once the panels are in the wild, the greatest challenge will
indeed be manufacturing them cheaply enough to meet demand. The
means used so far — assembling them by hand, which at one point
entailed working out of a Residence Inn in California — won't cut
it for much longer.

"That’s something we have to figure out, how
to mass produce these," he said.

Among the other unprecedented
things about the project is its complete rejection of
professional investors. Brusaw got into the details a bit more
about why they've decided to go down this path. He said he moved
to Idaho soon after leaving his job as the research and
development director at an Ohio manufacturing facility, scarred
by the effects of seeing his colleagues' jobs off-shored. He has
been wary of outside decision makers ever since.

"It bothers me that American businesses are transferring work
overseas — always has bothered me," he said. "Even at the company
in Ohio — I won't name them — someone else bought the company and
immediately started transferring work overseas, and the quality
became horrible."

The company will thus remain private, eventually to be funded
through sales alone. Brusaw says they've already been in talks
about shipping panels to NASA, Boise State, Wright State, and
Amtrak, which plans to repave a passenger platform with the
panels.

"Other people are saying, 'Can we buy stock? Will you go
public?'" Brusaw said. "If we go public, we'll have stockholders
to answer to, but they'll be more focused on increasing the
bottom line...I'm not going to do that."

Brusaw credits a screening of Al Gore's 2006 film "An
Inconvenient Truth" and his wife's encouragement with rekindling
a lifelong vision of making roadways somehow more useful than
hunks of asphalt. Thanks to Julie's successful therapy practice,
Brusaw says the family had a nest egg off which he could start
assembling his vision.